| 摘要 | John Irving is a fiction writer, and it shows.
Pretending he was writing a history in the pages of the New York Times, Irving wrote a fable. It’s the fable told by the abortion lobby, promulgated by the Democratic Party, and believed by most journalists.
“Abortion opponents don’t care what happens to an unwanted child,” wrote Irving, “and they’ve never cared about the mother.”
In a work of purported history, Irving bragged of his winning Planned Parenthood’s vaunted “Maggie Award,” named after Margaret Sanger. Sanger founded Planned Parenthood, of course, with eugenic purposes in mind. Maggie’s life work was “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”
Almost no defenders of legal abortion today share Sanger’s vile views. The abortion lobby today, as wrong as it is on the issue of human life, is not a eugenics lobby. But given its history, you would think Sanger’s side, the folks cheerleading today for the industry spending millions a year to lobby against even the slightest health and safety regulations on the abortion of unborn babies, would have some humility before denigrating the other side as evil.
But they don’t. It’s quite the opposite.
Defenders of legal abortion are in the early public stages of a concerted effort to brand the pro-life position as equivalent to Jim Crow. They are making the arguments and the policies that place opposition to abortion on the same level as virulent racism. Those who would protect the lives of the unborn are not merely wrong, according to this campaign, but ought to be unwelcome in polite society.
It starts with the fact-free slander by commentators and scribes like John Irving, who invent a caricature of pro-lifers. “[T]hey don’t care what happens to an unwanted child,” Irving wrote in the New York Times, in a line tweeted out by Planned Parenthood chief Leana Wen, “not after the child is born — and they’ve never cared about the mother.”
There is zero evidence that Irving or Wen has ever met a pro-life person. They should give it a try. They should talk to the people who pray the rosary outside of Wen’s abortion clinics. They should visit the crisis pregnancy centers Wen lobbies to shut down — those institutions that provide free healthcare and child care and other necessities both before and “after the child is born,” and for “the mother.” They will find people who dedicate their lives to helping mothers and children, including children in need of adoption. They should learn that pro-lifers are people too, motivated by love, but who arrive at a different conclusion on this sensitive question.
The fact-free, nasty stereotype of pro-lifers, that all of them are woman haters who don’t love children, is a necessary dehumanizing step to justify a nascent crusade to drive the pro-life position out of the public square.
Kamala Harris uses this line all the time, asserting that pro-lifers, all of us, don’t care about babies. Then Harris, who is running on the promise of turning her prosecutorial skills against her political enemies, pledges to sic the federal government on them.
“On this issue,” she says on the campaign trail when talking about how she’ll handle pro-lifers, “I’m a former prosecutor.” She sure is. As California’s lead prosecutor, she sicced the cops on a pro-life filmmaker who exposed Planned Parenthood’s very real sale of aborted baby body parts to the biotech industry.
Harris has repeatedly promised to take back America from extremists. Then she goes ahead and calls the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization present at nearly every parish in America, “extremist” because the group is pro-life. And now Harris says that she wants the Justice Department impose federal sanctions on states that pass pro-life laws, just as there are special federal rules for states with a history of enforcing segregation.
It’s a pattern, and it indicates a concerted campaign to weaponize government against political opponents. And much of the Democratic Party’s leadership is on board with it. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo famously stated that people who are “right-to-life … have no place in the state of New York.”
Major corporations are staking out the same position. The parent companies of NBC and ABC have both declared that they won’t make movies in Georgia because the state passed a bill restricting abortion to very early in pregnancy.
These corporate executives are buying what Planned Parenthood and Kamala Harris are selling: The idea that extending legal protections to the unborn is crossing a line of decency. We don’t and ought not have polite policy debates on segregation, and the Left is increasingly trying to place pro-life views in that same basket of deplorable opinions.
Step one is casting all pro-lifers as demons, essentially denying the humanity of millions of people. |
